The Mexico – United States Border (East & West) are two accordion books that examine the entire border through Google Maps satellite imagery: in the West from the Pacific coast’s urbanized area between San Diego and Tijuana, eastward to the Colorado River Delta and Sonoran Desert, through the Chihuahuan Desert, then following the course of the Rio Grande to the Gulf of Mexico in the East.

The aerial images are stitched together and straightened along the borderline, confining the nearly 2000 miles into a format of 10 x 2000 inches. The oppressive qualities of the border are here transformed into an oppression by the book format, as well as hardware and software limitations.

It outlines the contested border site – a defensive site for sovereignty, citizenship, the modern nation state – via satellite images, which are brought to us from defensive infrastructure, reconnaissance and territorial surveillance.

“Maps are sophisticated artefacts, to be read as much for what they reveal of the cultures that produce them as of the geographical information they represent.” – Dennis Cosgrove

The lack of an official database covering all police officer-involved homicides makes it quasi impossible to gather accurate numbers and statistics on a national level.Police Homicides is an attempt to look at the media landscape and the news reports on each police officer-involved homicide in the United States.

The collection of news articles stems from KilledByPolice.net and includes “corporate news reports of people killed by nonmilitary law enforcement officers, whether in the line of duty or not, and regardless of reason or method. Inclusion implies neither wrongdoing nor justification on the part of the person killed or the officer involved. The post merely documents the occurrence of a death.”

]]>http://danielschwarz.cc/police-homicides/feed/0Hackathon on Police Brutality Datahttp://danielschwarz.cc/hackathon-police-brutality/
http://danielschwarz.cc/hackathon-police-brutality/#commentsFri, 20 Feb 2015 01:20:36 +0000http://danielschwarz.cc/?p=632A Hackathon on Police Brutality Data in Los Angeles County, organized by students of the UCLA Information …]]>A Hackathon on Police Brutality Data in Los Angeles County, organized by students of the UCLA Information Studies Department. The event looked to engage those interested in community organizing, social justice, hacking, data mining with the imperfect data sets regarding police brutality in LA County. This hackathon examined how police brutality data is captured and disseminated among state and federal organizations and worked to bring attention to the existing data, as well as the holes in existing data through data mining and visualization.
It explored un- and under-reported incidents of police officer involved (POI) homicides. To fill gaps found in existing government and local databases pertaining to POI homicides, we deployed participatory action research methods through community involvement in mining and analyzing social media data related to these incidents. Through these methods, social media information operates in concert with publicly available government and local databases to create a clearer representation of the lived realities of communities experiencing police homicides in the United States.

Displays a photograph of the location where the most recent firearm homicide …

]]>Mobile Application for Android OS

Displays a photograph of the location where the most recent firearm homicide in Los Angeles County occurred. All images since the app’s installation are, without asking the user, permanently stored on the phone’s memory and accessible in the gallery.

Download for Android(.apk file, to install enable Administration Settings>Unknown Sources – allow installation of apps from sources other than the Play Store)